If you’re anything like me, you’ll struggle to visualise £1.7 billion – the sum Eurocrats are demanding in a backdated surcharge because Britain’s economy is doing better than expected. To put it in context, £1.7 billion would allow us to hire an extra 60,000 nurses and fund their pensions. It’s more than is raised by the bank levy. It represents an extra £65 a year for every family in the direct payments they make to Brussels – on top of the £525 they are already paying.

We measure out the turn of the year with familiar rituals: All Hallows, Bonfire Night, Remembrance Sunday. Plus, of course, my annual blog about how autumn is the finest season, nowhere finer than on this island.

It’s the combination of beauty and yearning, of gorgeousness and wistfulness, that makes these days so exquisite. Art is chiefly concerned with loss, and our remotest fathers felt the poignancy of season precisely as we do. Yesterday, I came across some haunting lines of Anglo-Saxon verse:

Beam sceal on eorðan
leafum liþan; leomu gnornian.

A tree on the earth must
lose its leaves; the branches mourn.

What a wonderfully English sentiment: sad, yet restrained. Not for us the breast-beating of peoples lit by hotter suns. Not for us the lamentations of races who have suffered… Read More

How peaceful the Spava seems now, the autumn colours reflected in its stately flow. In May, the river savagely burst its banks, devastating parts of Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, displacing thousands of people.

I'm blogging from Eastern Slavonia, where I'm with a team of Centre-Right politicians from all over Europe helping to repair some of the damage. Forty MPs, MEPs and candidates, from Iceland to Armenia, have taken part in the project, organised by the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists as part of our continuing social action programme.

My own constituency has experienced the nightmare of flooding: the backed-up sewers, the ruined photographs, the sumps of filth in what used to be your cupboards, the months of wrestling with your insurance company while you can't return home…. Read More

One of the saddest meetings I’ve ever had as an MEP was in Athens, with a 20-year-old from Enfield called Andrew Symeou. Two years earlier, Andrew had been celebrating the end of his A-levels on a Greek island. There was a fracas in a nightclub, during which a young man tragically died. Andrew wasn’t in the nightclub at the time, and didn’t match witness descriptions of the perpetrator. The case against him rested on identically-worded statements that had been beaten out of his friends. It would almost certainly not have come to court in this country.

But, under the terms of the European Arrest Warrant, Andrew was vacuumed away to Greece where he spent nearly three years in detention, 11 months of them in one of the nastiest prisons in Europe. When… Read More

David Cameron is not, on any normal definition, a Eurosceptic. He likes the EU well enough as it is. Sure, he’d ideally prefer to make some tweaks to it; but I have no doubt that, if there were a referendum tomorrow, he’d vote to stay in.

He and I will be on opposite sides when that referendum comes. But he still represents our only chance of getting one.

Two sets of people have evident difficulty with that last statement. First, Ukippers, who regularly tell me, as though it were a revelation, that the PM’s renegotiation won’t amount to a row of beans. Chaps, I know that. When both Nick Clegg and Ken Clarke endorse David Cameron’s negotiating aims without demur, when the PM himself makes clear that he is not looking… Read More

A Polish friend, an MEP of my sort of age, was telling me the other day about how his life changed when Pope John Paul II toured his home country. The papal visit set in train the events that led to the Gdansk protests and, in due course, the unravelling of the tyranny. But my friend added a detail that I had never before appreciated. “The Holy Father never directly condemned the Communist authorities,” he said. “He didn’t need to. He was offering something better”.

When you put it like that, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Offer something better. It worked during the recent Scottish referendum. For months, Unionists had warned of the horrors that would follow from separation: companies leaving, markets collapsing, Scotland left without a… Read More

It’s worth reminding ourselves that Britain already has a Bill of Rights. Lord Macaulay, writing in the 1840s, called it “the germ of every good law which has been passed during a hundred and sixty years, and of every good law which may hereafter, in the course of ages, be found necessary to promote the public weal, and to satisfy the demands of public opinion.” Nick Clegg called it “some law dating from 1689”.

I’m with Macaulay, obviously. But here’s the thing. The Bill of Rights did not elevate any rights above Parliament; rather, it made Parliament the protector of our rights. Our tradition is, in this regard, very different from the Continental one, where certain constitutional entitlements are lifted out of politics and safeguarded… Read More

You’d forgotten about the Liberal Democrats, hadn’t you? You vaguely assumed that they must already have held their annual get-together somewhere, and that you had missed it. Once a fixed, if minor, part of the political calendar, the Lib Dem Conference has now become one of those conventions of interest only to devotees, like a Star Trek Society AGM.

“What’s the point of the Liberal Democrats?” other politicians used to ask, theatrically. Nowadays, they don’t bother. What’s the point?

The Lib Dems have lost their way, their purpose and their soul. They used to be the party of democratic radicalism, but Nick Clegg’s petulant U-turns – rejecting parliamentary recall and trying to blame others, refusing a referendum on Lords reform and thereby killing the measure, opposing the vote on the… Read More

What do you suppose is the biggest item in the budget of a working household? The mortgage? The car? The utility bills? Nope. Far greater than any of these – greater, indeed, than all of them combined – is the tax bill.

Because taxation is generally deducted at source, we often fail to realise how much we’re paying. For most people, the only time when they must, so to speak, write a cheque to the taxman is when they pay council tax – which duly elicits disproportionate resentment.

Consider the figures above. They make a nonsense of Labour’s “cost of living” campaign, because the party plan… Read More

Eurosceptics, say half-clever columnists, are “unappeasable”. Bien pensant opinion holds that any concession made to critics of the Euro-racket serves only to excite further unreasonable demands. It doesn’t matter what HMG brings back from the talks, we’re told: Eurosceptics will whinge anyway, because whingeing is in their character. Right?

Au contraire, as we say in Brussels. Most Eurosceptics are optimistic souls. Pragmatic, too. And, more to the point, in a majority: when commentators talk of “the Eurosceptics”, they seem to have in mind only Conservative and UKIP MPs, not the 70 per cent of the country who say they want a trading rather than political relationship with the EU. So, in a cheerful, practical and majoritarian spirit, let me offer the PM nine specific ways to convince the country.